Is it theatre? Is it all theatre?
I I don't think it is. I mean, I think that it's, well,
OK to start off with, it's extremely difficult to interpret
Trump, what he's doing, what he's trying to achieve.
I think that one of the really relevant questions that is not
clear, even though people haste to make up their mind, it's not
at all clear whether Trump and his team have a well thought out
plan or whether they're they're just swinging left and right and
making it up as they go along. You know, and that's a very
relevant question because, you know, if you, if they have a, a
thought out plan, then you can try to guess what the plan is
and, and, and how they might be achieving, how they might be
moving ahead towards that plan, what the obstacles are and so
forth. Then the analysis is maybe a bit
easier if they're making things up as they go along, then it's,
it's impossible. It's just a, it's just a
Blizzard of, of nonsense coming at us from all side, all, all
sides all the time. Well, we also have to understand
that Trump has very, very powerful enemies because he
really is appending a system that's been, you know, it's
been, it's been created and reinforced as a way of
protecting the privileges of a certain privileged class in our
societies. And they are very upset with
Trump. And they are the people who
control the media, among other things.
And So what comes through from the media is reinforcing the
impression that this is just a circus and the Trump is making
things up as he's going along. He's no plan is there's nothing
other than chaos. And so we need to stop Trump and
stop the chaos and get the world back into a a rules based order.
I'm not entirely sure, but here's over the past three
months having spoken about this to a good many people, and some
of them claim that they have first hand knowledge from people
who are close to the Trump administration and who are
sometimes sitting in cabinet meetings.
The the feedback is that Trump is not a deep thinker, OK, which
doesn't, you know, which doesn't exclude the possibility that he
is, he has a certain intuitive acumen, which is which is
positive and accurate. You know that he knows what he
wants to do and he understands how to do it in a certain street
smart way. But I also have a pretty good
feedback about, you know, from a, from a Bosnian politician who
said that he went to a meeting at in Washington, not with not
with the Trump and his people, but a level, level down in the
hierarchy in the State Department.
And he said, you know, I, I went there prepared to explain to
them who we are and where Bosnia is on the map.
And he said, I was, I was shocked to find that they were
very, very well informed, very knowledgeable that they
understood the situation in detail and nuance.
And So what that tells me is that the maybe the top level
leadership they are as they are, you know, Cowboys may be
shooting off the hip and they know what they want to do, but
maybe the plan is vague. But that the, the people in, in
the deeper in the hierarchy of the, of the, of the command and
control structure are actually learned, sophisticated thinkers
who are doing their jobs properly.
And you know, there's always a two way communication going on.
So if, if the commander in chief says, hey, let's do this, people
down in the hierarchy will say, Sir, this is not a good idea.
And you know, as, as we've learned from many of these
military men, it's, it's in the end, it's the colonel's who, who
decide what is done and what is not done.
Because sometimes general who are, who are politically
appointed people aren't as competent as they are.
And they're all, you know, they're all ultimately afraid of
blundering. So they they don't, you know,
they won't, they, they might not insist if if a qualified person
tells them don't do this. OK, so having said all that,
let's pretend for a minute that they are, that they have a plan
and that they are trying to advance that plan.
What might that be? I think that, you know, we can
start with with the slogan Make America Great Again.
How would you do that? It would appear from, you know,
what we see and hear. It would appear that that just
going around shaking people down, telling them you do what
we say or we're going to hurt you, you know, and everybody
sees that. But I think that if we take a
very high level view and we take it in the historical
perspective, I I think that what Trump and his and this is where
the tariffs work into the equation.
I think that what Trump and his team are trying to achieve is to
return the United States from the British system of free trade
to the American system of productive economy.
OK, And So what is the difference?
The difference is that the British system of free trade
tends to create these boom bust cycles that the banking
interests in the economy consistently and repeatedly
inflate asset bubbles and then pull the rug from under them.
Because that's the, the, the process of creating private
money in the form of credit and then forcing it into the
economic system inflates asset bubbles, whether it's housing,
equities, bonds, whatever. They, they play this game as an,
as insiders. So they know what they're going
to do, right? They know they're going to prime
up the housing sector, for example.
And then they know how to position themselves in advance.
And then, you know, the, the, the, the credit impulse goes and
then people start buying houses, bidding up real estate prices.
And they, that way they inflate a bubble as they've done in the
early 2000s. And then at a certain moment,
they yank the credit, the bubble implodes, but they, they bail
out before that. And you know, we've seen that so
many times and it appears to be unrelated because, you know,
there was a bubble in Japan in the 1980s, there was a housing
bubble, there was a nasdaq.com bubble.
Now we have an everything bubble.
Well, OK, so bonds have started deflating properly, but until,
you know, until 2-3 years ago, everything was at 200 year
highs, right? And then in the process they,
they plunder a great deal of wealth from from out of the
society. And then they even through their
political influence, they get bailouts.
So when the housing bubble imploded in 2008, the bankers
got at least $16 trillion in bailouts.
They're too big to fail banks and not just American ones.
And that's official. That's according to the
Government Accountability Office.
Higher independent estimates go to as high as $29 trillion.
And I, you know, as a, as a lifelong market professional, I
think that whatever the government concedes, double it
at least. So I think that we're talking
something in the neighbourhood of $29 trillion, and that is
more than 85,000 U.S. dollars per man, woman and child living
in the United States. That's an absolutely massive
loot. And this same mechanism is being
perpetuated everywhere all the time.
You know, it, it's, it's, it's the, it's the system of colonial
loot. And so it leaves a country
crippled. It leaves a country impoverished
and destroyed, as we can see in the United States today.
You know, a couple of these couple of these bubbles burst
booms and busts and the United States is has been terribly
weakened. You know, the the US cities are
full of homeless people, drug addicts.
It's it and the infrastructure's falling apart.
It's been de industrialised largely.
So I think that making America Great Again probably is a is an
effort to reverse all this. And how do you reverse all this?
You have to allocate credit not to financial speculation, but to
the production of physical goods.
And so you have to repair, you have to repair the
infrastructure, you have to repair the energy systems,
ports, shipbuilding, communications, there's a lot of
work. And you also have to, you have
to disenfranchise the people who suck the wealth from out of the
society through these financial manipulations and speculation.
And, and these are very powerful and wealthy people.
So a Trump cannot come out in the open and say, hey, this is
what we're going to do. Because even though, even though
most people, you know, the ordinary people, entrepreneurs,
the employee people, everybody in the economy would say that's
great, at last there will be a lot of these very, very powerful
people who would want him dead. All eight US presidents who have
either been assassinated while in office or died suddenly and
mysteriously, all eight of them have been trying to promote the
American system of political economy.
What I'm talking about and this and this system goes back to the
1800s Abraham Lincoln's economic adviser, Henry Carey formulated
this in his book called Harmony of Interests.
And so the, you know, the, the powers that be don't want this.
They want pump and dump schemes forever because it's a, it's a
big wealth extraction conveyor belt that they control.
And if, if Trump is going to make America great again, then
this would be a way to do it. But then you also have to avoid
getting killed. And in Trump's case, you know,
today, it's enough that he's constantly bearished in the
media for this or that, that people lose confidence that
people think like, well, you know, this is a circus.
This is, you know, we're being led by clowns.
They have no idea what they're doing.
And so the, the headwinds are going to be very strong and very
powerful. And I think that this is what
we're seeing now. And whether Trump is going to be
successful or not, that's the thing that we can't know now.
We, we will have to wait and see and see how it goes.
In the meantime, I would just for your viewers and listeners,
I would suggest that we have to be a little bit circumspect
about the way we judge Trump and his administration because we
don't know exactly what they're doing and a lot of it.
Because if, what I'm saying, if there's some substance to what
I'm saying, then 100% they have to do it either covertly, they
have to hide their hand or they have to move in such an
unpredictable fashion that they, you know, they disorient their
opposition, that they, they, they, they confuse the
opposition. And so we have to, we have to
kind of accept that uncertainty is going to run high for a
while. But if you, if you blast them
and criticise them for everything, then you're actually
reducing the likelihood that they will be successful.
So you're actually helping the other side, which has been,
which has been ripping off and humiliating humanity
collectively for I, I would say at least two centuries now.
But Alex, I saw a video I think from 2012 of Trump giving a talk
and already there he was presenting a fairly anti China
stance, which indicates to me that he has a personal gripe
with China, unless I'm misinterpreting.
And then what about in 2024? I think one of his key advisors
wrote that document about how to readjust the global system,
which seems to be playing out right now.
Stephen Moran, I think his name is Stephen Moran.
Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I read Steve Moran's paper.
I, I can't say that I'm OK. I can say I'm impressed that
he's a very thoughtful man. I'm not necessarily impressed
with the, with the contents of the paper, but at the same time,
you know, the paper that's available out there.
I think I and my understanding is that it's not the finished
version. So, you know, whatever, but you
know, it's better than nothing. It means they think things
through. They have a strategy.
If you have a strategy, you have something to work on.
You know, strategies are never etched in stone documents.
You, you, you always have to adjust it with time because
things never play out the way you plan them to be.
OK, fair enough. The, the hostility towards
China, I'm not sure about that either, because I know from
Trump's mouth himself that he speaks to Xi Jinping on the
regular, because he not only conceded that he spoke with Xi
Jinping, but he also kind of in, in one of those press
conferences, I don't know, like 5-6 weeks ago.
He, he, he said under his breath.
I, I speak with him a lot. So there's a, there's a certain
level of coordination between, between Trump and his people and
Russians and the Russians and the Chinese.
The, the rise of China has actually been achieved by
applying this Hamiltonian American system of political
economy, right? And the Russians are following
the same model in, in, in their own way.
And so it seems to me that there's a certain level of
coordination which obviously again, cannot be fully
disclosed. And it seems to me that the this
hostility stance is more for show.
And I'll give you a concrete example.
One of the big problems in, in the, in the United States is
the, is the, the, the fentanyl crisis, the, the, the, the, the,
the crisis of overdose deaths. And these, these drugs are
flowing into the United States on an industrial scale.
And if you read the media, it's all China, China, China.
And Trump is not making much effort to distance himself from
this narrative. You know, it's China, China,
China. And so it would seem, you know,
like if you, if you, if you take your impressions from the from,
from the, you know, general narrative, you would, you would
get the impression that the Chinese are deliberately
smuggling drugs into the United States to, you know, to get the
Americans drugged up, I guess. But you know, Opium Wars have
been a tool and a weapon of foreign policy used by the
British Empire for over 200 years.
So that's, you know, that would be if I were investigating this
problem, that would be top of my list of, of, of, of suspects.
And then, B, the whole drug cartel network couldn't possibly
exist without the support and the service of money laundering
banks, because they generate something like $400 million of
revenues per week in the United States, and it's virtually all
cash. So Mexican drug cartels earn
billions upon billions of dollars in cash.
They have these pallets of cash that they have to bring.
Into Mexico, a large part of it goes back to Mexico.
What do you do with that money? What do you do with that cash?
You see, if you, if you take that money in cash, well, now
you have to store it somewhere and you have to pay guards to
guard it and you can't spend it on just anything.
You know you can how, what could you buy?
If you only had cash at your disposal, you could buy, I don't
know, some cars, some houses, some you could pay for some
prostitutes, you could buy some champagne and caviar.
But you know, after a while there's there's not much more
you can do with that because cash, there are certain
limitations to cash transactions.
As we know from investigative reports by, you know, by the by
the Pentagon, by by, by, by U.S. government.
Mexican drug cartels have heavy weaponry.
They have whole militaries fielded.
They have submarines, they have helicopters, they have anti tank
weapons. They have all kinds of stuff
that they could never buy with pallets of cash.
Another problem is that if you have cash, you have to pay men
to guard it. And what can happen is that
these men could say to themselves, hey, why should we
guard this money for El Chapo Guzman?
We can, we have weapons here. We're we're armed, we're
capable. Let's just take this money for
ourselves, start our own cartel. So, you know, you have, you have
a certain weakness, you have a certain vulnerability because
these piles of cash would be a magnet for alternative, you
know, rival gangs, for police and law enforcement, you know,
for all kinds of, you know, problems that would, that would
that this cash would attract. Whereas if you can deposit this
money in a in a bank account, so you have, you have a clean bank
account, well, then that bank account will have a signatory or
a few signatories. So El Chapo Guzman will have
exclusive right to use that money, or his or his accountant,
whoever. And then he decides who gets the
money, who doesn't get the money, what gets bought what
what doesn't get bought. And the bank is guarding the
money for him, no longer armed men.
Well, what that means is that the bank is actually, whether
wittingly or not, enforcing the the cartel's hierarchy because
he said, they say, we only recognise El Chapo Guzman as the
rightful owner of this account and we only take orders from
him. So if he orders a payment or a
transfer, we do it. If some guy from the from the
cartel does it, we don't. And so they actually anoint the
head of the cartel and by by virtue of giving him exclusive
access to this money, which is now being cleaned up by the
bank, they make that. This is a long explanation, but
I'll get to the to, to to your question.
So it's it's actually pretty much the bank that is the
ultimate godfather of those banking of those of those drug
cartels. Otherwise, if the if the bank,
if the if the cash was on a pile in a storage house, these
cartels would splinter into a million rival groups almost
instantly and largely eliminate themselves.
And then they would be relatively easy target for law
enforcement to mop up. As it is, that's nearly
impossible. It's you know, you can get El
Chapo Guzman, somebody will take his place.
It doesn't matter. And that somebody will always
have signature rights at the bank.
OK, so why am I saying all this? Because I've been trying to
write about this. I've been trying to kind of
alert people. Look, it's not China, it's not
Mexico. It's, it's the banks.
It's the banks always you, you cut the money laundering and
you've splintered the cartels. That's, that's how you destroy
it. So at the top of the heap in
Washington, you hear China, China, China.
That's the, that's the refrain that doesn't go away.
I mean, it goes away sometimes with Russia, Russia, Russia, but
then Iran, Iran, Iran. But it's always like that.
It's always some obvious target that people can all identify
because if you say banks, banks, banks, people think like should
I help? Should I hate my bank teller
there? So it's like that.
But then a few weeks ago, I watched an interview and
unfortunately I forget the man's name.
I forget his his office and I forget what network it was on,
but he was, yeah, sorry, but he was, he was one of the people I
think in the DEA Drug Enforcement Agency or, or one of
those tobacco firearms. One of those things in the, in
the, in the, in the, in the administration.
And he was investigating the fentanyl crisis.
And this was people will be able to find this because there was a
major bust of a very large fentanyl lab in in Canada.
And as it turns out, this is the biggest fentanyl lab they ever
busted. They, they, they ever knew that
they such a thing could exist. And then it turned out, we don't
know, there may be more fentanyl labs because a lot of these
drugs come from out of Canada. You know, the same place where
the prime ministers swears an oath of allegiance to the king
in London, that place. And then as he was, as he was
answering questions of the of the interviewer, and this is
like I think it was on a, on a, on a mainstream media and
network, he started getting into the role of the banks.
And so it was clear to me that people in the guts of the
administration get it. They understand what they up
against. Yeah.
So again, you know, the, the whole big explanation was to, to
maybe clarify the difference between the facade where you
have somebody at the top going, China, China, China.
Because that kind of gets media all excited and it gets
everybody's hair on fire. Whereas people who are actually
tasked with fixing problems have a much, much better
understanding of what they're up against and are probably
formulating ways to to deal with those problems.
So all wars are bankers wars? It turns out that that's that's
pretty much the way it is. That's.
Including tariff wars. Oh, well, you know, the tariff
war is. No, it's not.
No, that's not a bankers war that that war is.
That war could be said to be the People's War, Maybe, you know,
Do you mind? Expanding that a little bit
because, OK, so hang on, just for just for clarity, because
there's a lot of confusion around the pros and cons of
tariffs. Would you mind just making that
simple? OK, so the the obvious part,
which is, which is ostensibly the administration's intention
is to penalise imports and to attract manufacturing back home
to get the United States back on this American system of
political economy. You know, we produce goods and
services and we trade those goods and services, and that
slowly raises our prosperity back and makes America great
again. But at the same time, you know,
you're gonna, you're gonna trigger an inflation effect
because as soon as you start imposing tariffs on foreign
goods, the price of those goods is going to go up.
And not only that, but even domestic producers of those
goods are going to raise their prices because, because now they
can, you know, if you, if you make European cars 25% more
expensive, the next day, the American car manufacturers are
going to be raising their prices because there's now this gap.
There's so much more competitive, but they also want
to make money. So, and you get, you get
inflation effect from that. That's unavoidable.
There's another very, very important inflation effect with
tariffs is that, you know, the way the system has been set up
is that you have this non stop. And this is part of the, you
know, blowing of financialized bubble and creating this boom
and bust sequence is that the, the, the monetary mass in the,
in the United States has grown much faster than the GDP.
And, you know, Once Upon a time when people talked about
inflation, when, when economists talked about inflation, they
were not talking about the price rise.
They were talking about the growth of the money, mass growth
of the amount of money in circulation in an economy.
And so we've had this monetary inflation for for decades and
it's grown faster than the GDP, but it hasn't produced consumer
price inflation. And part of the reason there
there are two major pressure release valves in the in the
economic system that keep the monetary inflation into from
creating consumer price inflation.
One of them is the stock markets, the equity, let's call
it asset markets. So the money that goes into
stocks and bonds doesn't circulate in the bricks and
mortar economy, so it doesn't exert pressure on consumer
prices. That's one big pressure release
valve. The other one is foreign trade,
because you're importing goods from abroad.
These goods keep the price pressures at home down and the
money that you spend on this good goes into the goes into the
accounts of exporting nations with the Fed.
So that money doesn't circulate in your domestic economy either
and thereby it doesn't pressure the consumer prices.
So if you So what we've had in the United States since since
the 1980s, you had the, the trade gap, the, the, the, the
trade deficits going up and up and up and up.
And I think that by, by by February, by the time Trump came
to office, they reached $130 billion.
It was just going bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and
bigger. And then I think that even last
two months of, of last two months of, of Biden
administration, the, the, the autopen administration, they
went from about $78 billion in trade deficits in November of 24
to 130 billion in January, which is completely unprecedented.
It's a, it's a massive spike. It almost, it almost feels like
somebody did this on purpose to to rig the British economy,
gosh, to rig the American economy for demolition so that
it could blow up on Trump's watch.
But let's say that this trade deficit has reflects this
draining of the of the money inflation from U.S. consumer
markets so that you don't have consumer price inflation.
Now, when you start to close that gap, when you start
imposing tariffs and you start reducing this foreign trade in
favour of domestic producers, well, that's another, another
force that's going to exacerbate consumer price inflation.
So you know that's they're, they're going to get that
effect. But again, to be fair, we have
to, we have to recognise that Trump didn't create this.
All these imbalances have been gathering for several decades,
since the since the early 1980s. And this was patently
unsustainable. So, you know, when something's
unsustainable, it means it's going to blow up at some point.
And so if Trump did nothing, this would all blow up anyway.
So it seems to me that what Trump is doing is maybe start to
drain this, drain the water from behind the dam to reduce the
impact from from it just bursting uncontrollably again.
You know, it's, it's, it's risky and we don't know how it's going
to turn out. But you know, he, he started the
process, but he didn't create the imbalances that made the
process necessary. And this is.
Just part of the media narrative it it appears that Xi Jinping is
giving him the finger. It does appear so, but again,
you know, the the tariffs are the Wrecking Ball Trump is using
to raise this free trade system to the ground.
And I think that the Chinese would prefer the United States
to be on the American system because the Chinese strategy,
you know, the Chinese have positioned themselves as the
global manufacturing hub. They use the term mercantile.
Well, yes, but you know, they they want affluent consumers
everywhere in the world. They can buy their stuff.
So they don't want people everywhere to be poor with no
purchasing power. So for China, let's say a
prosperous United States would be preferable than a desperate
United States. That's then a security, a
security concern. So I think that in with a longer
view, the Chinese might prefer the United States to move away
from free trade and or let's say some kind of a controlled free
trade on a bilateral basis away from this globalist WTO open
free trade where the United States has pretty much become a
a buyer of last resort consuming crap from all over the place on
credit. You know, so they consume,
consume, consume and their debts are just exploding.
It's all on debt. You know, it's a system that's
going to implode anyway at some point.
You can't run credit card tab forever and keep buying junk
from everywhere. And so this system has to be,
you know, the, the, the change of course was, was was overdue
and it was going to forced by the markets on the United States
in one way or another. And well, you know, Sergey
Karaganov, several months ago, before Trump was inaugurated, he
said that we see a role as helping the United States
transition from being an empire to just being a major power in
in the least disruptive way possible.
And I think that the Chinese see it the same way.
And so I think between Trump and Xi Jinping, there might be a
disoriented war of words, but also a certain level of
coordination and cooperation. So, Alex, are you suggesting
that Trump is in favour of multipolarity?
Oh yes. Oh, that's 100% because that's
go back to 15 January of this year when Marco Rubio was going
through his confirmation hearing.
He explicitly said we have to recognise the world is shifting
to a multipolar architecture. And and he also said that we see
the post World War 2 global order as more than obsolete.
His words and it's actually being used as a weapon against
us, his words. And so Marco Rubio didn't come
up with that himself. Marco Rubio was stating the
policy position of this administration.
And that was an extremely important revelation there.
Obviously, you know, the media kind of glossed over it because
they would prefer we don't think about it too much.
But yes, I think that they are definitely shifting in favour of
multipolarity. So if they're shifting in favour
of multipolarity, what does that mean for the US dollar
internationally? I think that the US dollar is
going to yield its, its role as a global reserve currency and
global trade settlement currency to something else, which I think
will partly you see the the architecture that it seems to me
that the Chinese and the Russians are favouring is some
kind of a future currency that's going to back by not only gold
but other commodities. And then it's going to be a, a
basket in which many countries will participate in proportion
of their contribution to that basket of commodities.
So, you know, the United States is a, is a, is a great producer
of, of commodities. It's a very resource rich
nation. So it will have a major role in
that system. This, this kind of thing has
been formulated in, in a number of papers.
I I read a few published by by Russian.
I don't know think tanks, academics, people who are people
who are working on this, on this problem matter.
And I think that this too is part of Trump's plan because one
of the big vulnerabilities for the United States is that
there's about an estimated 32 or 34I, I forget exactly trillion
dollars worth of U.S. dollar denominated assets sitting owned
by foreign interests. And this is, this is a real
source of vulnerability because at a given moment, if they all
decide to dump their U.S. dollar assets, that could, that could,
you know, that could be a tsunami that hits the US economy
and their and their stock markets and the dollar.
And so part of the game with the tariff force is also going to
deflate that dam, you know, drain, drain some water from
behind that dam to reduce that pressure.
And then I think, you know, there's been there's been talk
about maybe setting up a dual currency system in the United
States where you have a foreign dollar and a domestic dollar.
So, you know, the domestic dollar is used by, you know,
people to transact their business at home and the foreign
dollars used for foreign trade. And this is this is the model
that the Chinese have. And this model has insulated
China from external shocks. And you know, in the last 40
years, China hasn't really, you know, they had they had
financial crisis in the sense that, you know, they have this
real estate, they had this residential real estate bubble
that burst. But if you remember in 1997 when
there was a, a massive East Asian financial crisis that
pretty much engulfed all the East Asian tiger economies,
China went unscathed. And this is exactly why, because
they are, because they have this dual currency, their domestic
economy was not impacted. And so I think that it makes
sense that the United States should maybe follow the same
model again, to insulate themselves from external shock
to which they're very vulnerable.
So that might be, you know, I don't know, maybe maybe I'm
giving the administration too much credit.
Maybe I, I overestimate them. But knowing the nature of the
game, I know that if they were thinking along these lines, they
would not be able to say it out loud explicitly.
They would have to work on this covertly.
So we're, we're obliged to guess anyway.
So you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll take the luxury of, I'll
take the freedom of, of guessing wrong.
But I, you know, if you guess otherwise, it's still a guess.
You don't know. And.
OK, so, so, so ultimately a friendship between America and
China is the best outcome. That's the win, win.
There's no point in them competing.
So what they have to do therefore is push ahead with the
multipolarity. Is that correct?
I I think that's absolutely clear.
And you know, they, they need to, there's, there's going to be
competition, obviously there's going to be some rivalry in some
sectors, but there's also a great deal of complementarity.
Is that a word? It is now.
Yeah, so I I officially inaugurate that their their
their compliment. There's, I'm really confused
there, you know, there are areas where the, where they, their
economies could be complementary.
Complementary. Complementary, yeah.
I don't know if complementarity is quite it.
That really like tilted my brain so.
And so they can, you know, they can cultivate, that they can
develop, that they can trade with one another.
There would be a lot of stuff that the that the Chinese would
want to import from the United States.
There's a lot of things that the Americans would like to import
from China. There's a lot of things that
they could develop together to trade with other parts of the
rest of the world. So, you know, there's no reason
to always default to hostility And well, you know, if you are
competing as we, we just have to take the Tonya Harding approach
to competition and, and, and, and kneecap you and, and wage
war. That's, you know, that's, that's
the dumbest approach to, to, to things.
And I hope that, that that cannot happen overnight.
You know, there's certain modalities, modalities of
behaviour have become hardwired. There's people who have adopted
a certain school of thought, certain approach to thinking and
have been, you know, in the guts of the system for decades.
They're not going to change overnight.
But if you're talking to the people, and so if Trump and his
people are talking to the Russians, they're talking to the
Chinese, you know, little by little, they can cooperate.
They can coordinate. They can define areas of
cooperation. They can forge bilateral
agreements that are going to work for both sides and then
gradually build on that. And then, you know, it obviously
has to include cultural exchange so that you, you preempt the,
the, you know, the xenophobia, the, the mutual fear of the two
sides. And then, you know you can you
can move the world towards peaceful cooperation and
prosperity. It's not a fantasy.
If you read Henry Carey's Harmony of Interest, that's
practically exactly what he says.
The American system is moving the world towards permanent
peace and prosperity, whereas the British system of free trade
practically requires the estate of permanent warfare.
That's so interesting because that goes against the the free
market arguments from people like Rothbard and and Mises and
and Hayek, etcetera. Yeah, it it, it certainly does.
And I know that there are many people there who are, who are
very committed to the the, to the ideas of the Austrian School
of Economics. I was one of them, but I've
grown, I've grown convinced that actually Austrian School of
Economics has controlled opposition because there are too
many, there are too many very obvious flaws in their theory.
I'll give you an example. It's, it's practically taken as
as as axiomatic that everything privately owned and privately
managed is far superior to anything state owned as state,
state, state managed. Well, if you look around, it's
very obvious that this is simply not true.
I'll give you, I'll give you a simple example, you know,
because I, I grew up in former Yugoslavia and I grew up in
Croatia, which was one of the six republics comprising former
Yugoslavia. It was a socialist country.
So I, I saw, I saw the transition from the socialist
economy to the capitalist economy.
We went along with everything. We just basically took Western
legal code and copy pasted it into our own legal code.
Everything become privatised. And so one, many of these, many
of these things like water utilities, trash, trash
collection, it all went to private owners and it all did
post Postal Service. It all deteriorated so radically
that it's, it's glaringly obvious to everyone.
You know, our cities used to be very clean and the, the, the
technology of taking people's trash and removing it was
something that we took for granted.
As far as I'm concerned, it was just magic.
But you put your trash in the dumpster and it went away and
that was it. And the city was clean.
Well now it's privatised and trash is everywhere.
The cities are no longer clean. It's it's.
It stinks because you know in order to boost their profits
they reduce the the number of runs they do.
So it went from trash being collected every day, which is
what you want to do if you want to keep your cities clean.
They do it once a week. Instead of picking it up in many
spots. They've reduced the number of
spots. So they, they actually kind of
dumped the work of taking trash on people.
So now instead of dumping your trash 10 metres from your house,
you have to walk 200 metres with your trash so that they can
collect it in, in just in fewer locations.
It makes sense from their point of view.
They want to make profits, but it doesn't make sense for for
from society. And then because they collect
the trash only once a week, what happens is that this trash kind
of rots there. And in the summer it's a serious
problem because every 200 metres as as you walk around the city,
and this includes tourist resorts, it smells that there's
a rotting corpse somewhere. Well, this begins to become a
problem because it attracts rats.
And so you, you, you know, you, you're creating the risk of very
high external cost because at some point with all these rats
and cats and stray dogs and fleas and, and other and, and
maggots and flies, you're actually creating conditions for
the outbreak of things that we thought we overcame like black
plague. Like, like, like, you know, you
can create serious problems just so that the trash corporations
could be profitable and and maximise their profit so that
their share price could go up sky high versus when this was
stayed owned and stayed managed. The cities were clean.
None of these problems cause same thing with water.
We took clean water out of the faucet for granted.
Well, now every so often they tell us, oh, you know, you have
to boil water in many cities, the water looks like the water
in the United States, You know, rather than being clean, it's
kind of brownish, yellowish and, and and cloudy.
And people are reporting health problems.
This is all private enterprise that has degraded the system.
Our post office under socialism used to be like Federal Express
Express on its best day, only super cheap.
Now it's a disaster. Sometimes parcels come empty,
somebody opens them, takes the stuff, a letter from major
cities travel three weeks, whereas they used to travel less
than a day under socialism. And on and on and on and on.
What is the ultimate win win? No tariffs anywhere or tariffs
in various guises. I would say probably tariffs in
various guises because you do want international trade.
You don't want a patch word of autarkies around the world like
North Korea that, you know, everybody has to be completely
self sufficient in everything. You know, there's always going
to be some things that the Americans are going to be making
that's better than anywhere in the world.
And there's always going to be things that the French are going
to make that's going to be and we're going to want those
things. You know, I, one of the things
on my Christmas list would be to own a Steinway piano, which are
made in New York and they are, you know, they're, they're just
like one of those things like the, the, the Rolls Royce of
pianos offenders very. For for for guitars.
Exactly, Britain makes the world's best hi fi systems, you
know, amplifiers and and, and, and things like this.
And so you're, you're always want to, because it's not just
the ability to put together big machines that that produce these
things. There's a lot of knowledge, a
lot of experience, a lot of like artisanal know how that goes
into producing these top level things.
And and that's true everywhere. You know, French wines, Italian
garments, clothes and and, and and jewellery shoes, you know,
apparel. Every country has certain things
that they're really good at because not only do they make
them, they cultivate generational know how that you
know, advances and refines itself and then, you know, it
turns into something that you would prefer to have then over
some kind of a forced domestic produced alternative to it.
So I think that we're we're going to always have global
trade, but you're going to also want to protect domestic
producers of other things. You don't want to just allow the
place to be flooded every so often and and everything raised
to the ground. But isn't let me use that free
market argument. Isn't choice the ultimate
freedom? Yes, I think that.
Statement is true. Well sorry, let me rephrase
that. You say the market gets flooded
with let's pretend Chinese crap, but people are choosing to buy
that. Yes and no.
Because it would be, it would be like saying people are choosing
to buy cheap food. So everybody buys cheap food.
It's it's they're choosing it because it's cheap and they're
also choosing it because they can't afford more expensive
stuff. You know, if people could buy
expensive seafood, food and champagne every day and have it
on their table, I think that they would choose that.
And the fact that they buy, you know, large bottles of Coca Cola
and, and, and, and cheap bread with white flour, it's because
they can't, they can't do better.
And I think that it's, you know, as you, as you raise a
community's prosperity and standards of living, they're
going to make different choices. And I think that we all prefer
quality products over cheap crap.
And I think that if we could afford quality products,
everybody would have a Steinway piano and A and A and a Fender
Stratocaster instead of, you know, some cheap Chinese
alternative to the. I just want to say that I have a
Fender Stratocaster from the United States.
There you go. Yeah, yeah.
Is the tariff war that we're currently seeing an attempt to
bring sovereignty to America? Yeah, I I think so.
I think so. But again, you know, we'll see
where it goes. You see, I have a hard time with
the idea that Trump and his cabinet are just clowns
careening from one crisis to the next without a plan.
Because if that were the case, they would never have even
started the tariff war. You know, if they if they did
this, they did it for some reason.
So you're forced to try to understand what could be the
reason. What's worse, the the attacks
and political pressures that they must have known this would
this would draw on them. And I think that, you know, the
the make American great again slogan is is probably more
important than just a bumper sticker sticker slogan for
election purposes. I think maybe that's as
important to them as build back better.
What is to the Davos set? You know, there's a, there's
like a, there's like a whole agenda, an intended agenda.
You know, it's something that that that you intend to
accomplish. So you're not just shooting off
the hip randomly. You're actually trying to take
the system somewhere. And so even, you know, like,
even if very serious mistakes are made, even if, even if the
strategy ultimately fails because it could, it's very hard
for me to to reconcile this with the idea that, oh, they're just
a big bunch of clowns who have no idea what the hell they're
doing. And by extension, is Is this a
good thing for bricks? Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Because you see, my conviction is that the the most important
struggle in the world today is the struggle for the United
States. Because if the United States
aligns with the multipolar world and becomes a part of it, you
know, a major part of it, but a part of it, you know, I think it
was Larry Johnson in one of our conversations who said that the
choice before the United States now is either to be the world's
policeman or to be the polite guest at the, at the, at the
global banquet. And so that that is really the
choice. Are you going to join the
multipolar integrations and be part of it?
Or are you going to force your order on everybody else at the,
at the, you know, with a, with a, with a gun to everybody's
head? And so for the multipolar
integrations, having the United States become part of them and
become that polite guest at the table is a huge win because it
also takes the United States away from the globalist forces
that want the United States to be their enforcement arm with,
you know, 1000 military bases everywhere around the world,
telling everybody you do as we say or, or we're going to hurt
you, sending these carriers, strike groups and bombing the
crap out of everybody. It will be a much, much better
world. And we see how desperate the
other side is to keep the United States on their side at the
moment, concretely to be the guarantor of security for the
Ukraine's government, which is, you know, the idea is that the
United States does all the heavy lifting and all The Dirty work
while the, you know, European banking families continue to
enjoy, enjoy their privileges. But then this also by extension,
means that the US would become less favourable to NATO.
Yes, absolutely. That's, that's a given.
NATO is the creation of this, of this globalist set.
It's, it's whole history is, is very, very suspect.
You know, we didn't know these things, but we know that NATO
was created, I think in 1948 or 1949 right out of practically,
you know, the, the, the smoke, the, the, the, the smoke from
World War 2 was still smouldering when Winston
Churchill declared the Soviet Union the enemy of the West.
That was in 1946. It was his Fulton speech in
front of Harry Truman. And ever since the, the West has
been moving pieces into place to create this Cold War between the
West and, and the Soviet Union. And you know, the NATO has just
kind of grown by accretion around that.
And the United States has always been the main military,
political, diplomatic and, and, and financial muscle behind
that. So if the United States
withdraws from Europe, that whole thing, you know, collapses
into nothing. Look, I I could turn out to be
wrong, but you know, everybody who is opining on this is
guessing. Yes.
And we don't, we don't exactly know, you know, I, I, I heard
the other day somebody whose opinion I really respect opine
on this very negatively. And they were saying that, oh,
you know, this is putting the independence of central bank in
jeopardy. And and I'm thinking like, how
is that a bad thing? Excuse me, Why is why is the
independence of central bank all of a sudden, this sacred cow
that we shouldn't, we shouldn't question.
You see, that's that's what I was referring to.
There's been a certain school of thought has become entrenched in
our society to the extent that many people now, almost by knee
jerk reaction, default to the opinions they they they formed,
they formed a long time ago. And until they questioned them,
they will, they will often default also to the wrong
conclusion and and then invalid analysis.
And I'm, you know, I grew up in communism, so I became very
comfortable early on in my life with questioning absolutely
everything because up until I was 1718 years of age, I was
taught about communism, about Marxism, the greatest thing ever
since sliced bread, right? And then it turns out the whole
thing was a lie. The whole thing was like kind of
contrived in order to uphold the communist ideology, but every
part of it was flawed or, or, or outright false.
And so I take the same approach with, with Western ideology,
with Austrian School of Economics, with Milton
Friedman's economics, with Keynesian.
I, I mean with the whole political everything, I, I, I
don't take anything for granted. And so I try to avoid, to
default to these opinions that stem from assumptions.
Then maybe themselves are not valid.
But that doesn't mean that I'm right.
I could turn out to be wrong as well.
How can I follow your work? There are many ways, but three
platforms where I'm the most actives, most active is on X.
My handle is AT naked Hedgy. I have a personal publication on
sub stack called Alex Craner's trend compass.
No, sorry, Alex Craner's sub stack.
And then I have a a news, the daily newsletters for the daily
newsletter for investors and traders called Isystem trend
compass. So that's that's three places
where I'm most active. Then then there's a company
website and blah blah blah. But these three are the easiest
places to find me. Well, on that note, let me try
that again. On that note, Alex Craner, thank
you for joining me in the trenches.
Jeremy, great pleasure. Thank you for having me and warm
greetings to your viewers and listen.